


A Ghost Just Needs a Home

by chocolatelabraderp



Category: Spring Awakening - Sheik/Sater
Genre: AU, Coffeeshop AU, College AU, F/M, Modern AU, all the aus, everyone is alive AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-03
Updated: 2013-07-03
Packaged: 2017-12-17 12:36:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,676
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/867620
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/chocolatelabraderp/pseuds/chocolatelabraderp
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Moritz's first semester of college has been pretty rough . . . and getting back in touch with Ilse's not that easy, either.</p><p>Warning: mentions of suicide/depression/anxiety; brief strong language.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Ghost Just Needs a Home

**Author's Note:**

> Written for arrameas@lj for the Small Parts Fest theatre exchange. Beta'd by the wonderful youwilllovemylaugh and lecroft (she's over on tumblr). Title taken from "Weighty Ghost" by Wintersleep.

Moritz Stiefel squints at the clouds, but can’t find the sun. The wind is bitter against the upturned collar of his jacket, stinging his ears, and he shoves his hands into the pockets of his jeans to protect them. They’re cracked and red from an autumn of standing outside, toasting his lungs with cigarette smoke.

            He ducks into Rhythm & Brews for something warm, nearly tripping over the hand-chalked easel of specials just inside the door. He recognizes Thea’s loopy handwriting, little bubbles topping each _i_ , a privilege earned by being the owners’ daughter. He wonders how long she’s been home. It’s been a while since he’s seen a familiar face around the shop.

            But Ernst is working the counter, and his face brightens when he sees Moritz approaching. It’s a cautious kind of brightness, Moritz can tell – he knows Melchior told them all what happened, which is preferable to having to struggle through the story again himself – and he doesn’t blame Ernst for not knowing quite how to handle him. But all the same, it’s nice to see a friendly face. With the exception of Melchi, he hasn’t seen anyone from their old circle since his episode.

            “Hey,” says Ernst, and his voice sounds a little lower than Moritz remembers. “How are you doing?”

            There’s the caution again, a kind of guard going up in his tone. Maybe he thinks crazy is contagious.

            “I’m okay,” says Moritz. “I mean – all things considered.”

            Ernst nods, and a lull bridges the counter between them. Moritz stares at his shoes, and finally Ernst says, “Dark-roast-milk-three-sugars?”

            Moritz’s eyes flick back up. He has always felt forgettable – there’s nothing special about him, really, a notion that’s only exacerbated by his constant position in Melchior’s shadow – and he has always accepted it as fact that if he disappeared, he would not be missed. But now, just for a second, he wonders if that’s not as true as it seems. If Ernst, after a full semester of college and a host of other things that are undeniably more relevant, can still remember how he takes his coffee – well, it’s not the _first_ thing Moritz wants people to remember about him, but it’s something.

            He pays for the coffee and collapses at the back corner table, where he spent most of his high school afternoons. He makes a list of the assignments due in the week left before finals: the chapter sixteen review in the back of his statistics textbook; a response to _Young Goedeschal_ ; a paper on the fall of the Roman Empire. He can get it done, he tells himself. As long as he concentrates and takes his pills and doesn’t go too hard on himself, he’ll be okay.

            Or that’s what everyone keeps telling him, at least.

            He’s three equations in when Martha tousles his hair. “Hey there,” she says, wiping the table next to his with a damp cloth. “Haven’t seen you in quite a while.”

            She knows what happened – he can see it on her face, the concern clear in her dark eyes. Her hair is cropped short, a pixie cut that suits her far better than her braids ever did. He likes Martha, finds her gentler and sweeter than the other girls with whom he grew up. She has a quiet kind of wisdom about her, soft eyes that see through his nervousness and stammering to the sadness underneath.

            “Your hair looks nice,” he says, because it seems like a good way to defuse the imminent discussion of his well-being.

            She smiles, running a hand across the back of her hair. “It was the first thing I did after I moved into school,” she says. “It feels nice. Free.” She slides into the chair opposite his, propping her chin in her hands. “How are you?”

             He sips his coffee, jots a few notes in the margin of his statistics textbook, feeling her eyes rove over him. His fingers tighten around his pencil, and he chews his lower lip. “I’m okay.”

            She’s quiet for a moment, and then says, “Melchior said you tried to . . .”

            He looks up. He waits for her to say _again_ , but then he remembers – only Ilse knows about the first time.

            Martha holds his gaze until he says, softly, “Yes.”

            “Why?”

            He shrugs. There were so many pieces of it, so many fragments that no longer seemed to fit together – it seems impossible to narrow his answer down to one of them.

            Maybe it was his enrollment in the local community college, when all of his friends were headed to universities with prestigious names in exciting locations. Maybe it was his inability to choose a major due to his inability to excel at anything. Maybe it was that everyone else seemed to have someone – Melchi and Wendla, Martha and Otto, Hanschen and Ernst, Anna and Georg, Thea and her parade of boy-toys. Maybe it was the distinct sense that everyone else was too busy for him. Maybe it was his father’s expectations, maybe it was the deluge of schoolwork that came with college, maybe it was the weather. Maybe it was Ilse, who saved him once and then left him behind.

            “He said you were in some kind of institution,” Martha prompts, and Moritz almost smiles. Leave it to Melchi to make the experience sound as esoteric as possible. 

            “A psych ward,” Moritz corrects her, tapping his fingers against his coffee cup. “Not an institution. Not exactly.”

            “What was that like?”

            He still isn’t quite sure of how he feels about his time in the psych ward: five long, struggling days of learning how to breathe instead of cry. He was assigned a psychiatrist, who diagnosed him with acute anxiety and severe depression and prescribed him a handful of pills, the antitheses of the ones that landed him in the psych ward in the first place.

            “Structured,” he says, after a moment. “Everything is very routine, which is nice, but . . . as soon as you get used to it, it’s time to leave, and then you have to go back out into the real world and learn how to deal with it again.” He presses his pencil to the paper, doodling tight spirals between his equations. “One of the nurses reminded me of you. She was my favorite.”

            Martha smiles. “How do you feel now?”

            He considers it. “Better, I think. I’m sleeping more. I don’t feel as bad all the time.” He sips some coffee. “I’m not supposed to be drinking this, I don’t think. It makes the anxiety worse or something. But I don’t think one cup will really hurt.”

            “Anxiety?”

            “Oh,” he says.  “Yeah. And depression. I thought Melchi would have told you.”

            She shakes her head. “No, I think he probably wanted to leave that to you.”

            A flash of red hair catches Moritz’s eye, and for one whirling, confusing moment he stares past Martha expecting to see Ilse’s pale, freckled face – but the girl who turns from the counter is all wrong, fake-tanned and thin-lipped, and he slumps back in his seat, heart drumming.

            Martha turns, but any resemblance is lost on her. “Are you okay?”

            He nods quickly, chewing his lower lip so hard that he draws blood, and washing it down with a gulp of coffee. “Have you . . . have you seen Ilse around at all?”

            “I haven’t,” says Martha, and thus he exhausts his most probable source – he was hoping that maybe all the foster kids ran in the same circles or something. “But I guess Thea’s parents see her here sometimes, because every now and then Thea hears something about her – she got a haircut, or she’s working here or there, little things like that. Remember when they used to have sleepovers every weekend? And when they made all the boys bow to them at recess when we were younger?”

            He remembers. Thea and Ilse, terrors and queens of the playground – his knees had hit the earth before Ilse’s feet more than once. Thea rarely paid attention to him, but Ilse had been known to invade his or Melchi’s backyards and interrupt their games of soccer or cops and robbers (Melchi, the cop; Moritz, the robber) in favor of more interesting pastimes: Pirate Ship, or Buried Treasure, or Olympic Games. She was the only person – besides maybe Martha – who seemed to prefer his company to Melchior’s, and although she wasn’t the only person he’d ever told about feeling so lonely, she was the only person who’d ever said she understood.

*

            When Moritz stops at the coffee shop that weekend, Martha is on dish duty, so he collects his dark-roast-milk-three-sugars from Ernst and takes up his post at the back corner table. He can survey the entire café from here, and as he pushes through _Young Goedeschal_ , he keeps a lookout for any bit of Ilse that might register on his radar.

            The last time he saw her, her reddish hair hung long and heavy down her back, curling in the spring mist. She’d been wearing a man’s white shirt, miraculously unsullied; it masked the shape of her body in a way that was somehow more suggestive than prudish. The shirttails nearly obscured the fraying edges of her denim shorts, and only when she’d shifted before him did Moritz realize she was wearing shorts at all. She was barefoot, as she had been much of their childhood, and she wore a bracelet of bruises, shades of purple wrapped around her wrist in the shape of five fingers.

            He wonders if she has any bruises now. He wonders if she has winter clothes. He wonders if she went away to school. He looks up every time he hears a girl place an order, just in case it’s her, and even though the shop is bustling and noisy, he can tell that none of these customers is the one he’s looking for.

            The nineteenth, maybe twentieth girl’s voice is familiar, throaty. Moritz stands up so quickly he almost upends his table, his empty coffee cup toppling to the floor. He can hear her voice echo, giving a different kind of order: _Moritz, you be my first mate. That means you do what I say. Moritz, you can win the gold medal next time, but right now you have to be the fan. Clap for me, Moritz! Scream my name!_

            He leaves his bookbag at the table and stumbles through the knot of people waiting for their drinks, all jostling elbows and slipping on napkins and maybe accidentally spilling an old woman’s tea. For the first time, he curses Thea’s parents for running a coffee shop that is cheaper and nicer and more central than Starbucks, because right now it feels like the whole fucking town is standing between him and Ilse.

            He is nearly at the front of the shop – he can see her red hair, green sweater – when Melchior appears before him.

            “Moritz!” he says, and Moritz deflates.

            “Hi, Melchi,” he says, and over his best friend’s shoulder he watches Ilse leave the shop.

            Melchior tosses a glance behind him, but the familiar face, of course, is already gone. “Everything okay?” he asks, and his eyebrows pull together in the way they do when he’s examining Moritz, trying to determine from the outside what kind of turmoil is present inside.

            “Fine,” says Moritz. “I – you must be home, then? From school?”

            Melchi nods. “Yes, yesterday. And – well, you’ve been home.”

            It’s meant to be a harmless statement – Melchior rarely speaks to wound – but it cuts through Moritz, darkening his eyes and slumping his shoulders. Of course he’s home – he never left.

             He has seen Melchior exactly once all semester, in the hospital after his episode. Melchi had a lot to say about Moritz’s diagnosis, speculating circles around it until Moritz, fuzzy with fledgling prescriptions, had waved him out to fall asleep. He can’t remember much of what Melchi said, just a haze of chemicals and psychobabble. He does remember that Melchi asked why, and he remembers that he did not answer.

            “I was hoping to see you,” says Melchi, and that’s when Moritz knows that he won’t get to chase after her. He loves Melchior; they’re best friends, nearly brothers; he would do anything for Melchi, but Melchior is notoriously long-winded, and they have an entire semester to discuss.

“Come on,” says Moritz reluctantly, turning back toward the throng of customers. “I’ve got a table in the back.”

“Right,” says Melchi. “Yeah. There’s some stuff I want to talk to you about, anyway.”

They push their way to the rear of the shop, and Moritz removes his bookbag from the opposite chair. Melchior sits, crossing one ankle across the other knee. “So,” he says haltingly. “You seem to be doing okay.”

Moritz shrugs. “I’m all right. Approaching finals now, so maybe not as all right as I could be, but . . . I’m holding it together.”

Melchior nods, his eyes tracing the grain of the table. “You look better. Not as, um. Not as . . .”

“Dead?” Moritz supplies, and Melchior flinches. Harsh phrasing, maybe, but that’s the best way Moritz can describe how he feels: not as dead. 

Melchi nods again, slowly. “I guess that must be it.” Then, his eyes lighting on Moritz’s battered copy of _Young Goedeschal_ , “Oh, are you reading Fallada? His prose is so beautiful. You can practically feel his grief in every word.”

Trust Melchi, Moritz thinks, to be familiar with the most obscure novel that’s been assigned in Moritz’s German Lit class. “I like it, mostly. Sometimes it hits a little too close to home.”

Something shifts in Melchior’s blue eyes. “Right,” he says, suddenly humbled. “Right, of course. I – is that good for you, Moritz, reading something like that?” 

Moritz can hear Frau Gabor in his voice, questioning the propriety of Melchior’s literary choices since he became old enough to choose his reading material without supervision. “I think it’s okay,” says Moritz. “Even when it gets to be too much, it’s kind of nice to know it’s not just me who feels that way. Someone else understands it too.”

Because that’s at the core of it – nobody, save for Ilse in their sporadic bursts of friendship, has ever quite understood his loneliness. Melchior, of course, has never wanted for company – everyone wants to be Melchior’s friend, and when he’s alone he loses himself in books and finds solace there. Martha has her girlfriends to fall back on; they’ve been inseparable since they were children. And Moritz wouldn’t trade Melchior for the world – Melchi is the best friend anyone could have, and Moritz is eternally grateful that he still chooses to hang out with him. But Melchi doesn’t realize, Moritz thinks, what a hard act he is to follow. He’s been pulling straight As since they started school, playing soccer forward on the advanced team, devouring every book in the school library. Moritz, for all his determination to keep up with him, is always a few steps or pages or letter grades behind him. Melchior gets everything he works for; Moritz just works – Tantalus, never quite able to reach his prize. Being Melchior’s best friend has trained him for a lifetime of not being good enough. 

Melchi cocks his head. Moritz expects him to spout something analytical, but instead he says, “Is that why you did it?” 

Moritz tenses, leaning down to pluck his forgotten coffee cup from the floor. “Because of _Young Goedeschal_?” 

“No,” says Melchi. “The understanding. Or lack thereof.”

Moritz straightens in his seat and glances at Melchior, who does not, for once, look calm and collected. He looks, Moritz thinks, halfway down the highway to distraught. 

“Are you okay?” Moritz asks, and he can count on one hand the times he’s asked Melchior that question in their thirteen years of friendship. 

Melchior blinks at him. “You tried to kill yourself,” he says, slowly and incredulously. “And I had no idea. I should have seen something, some sign or red flag or something. But I didn’t – we didn’t really talk a lot over the semester, did we? I should have called you to make sure you were okay here. I should have kept in better touch. I spent all semester reading and playing soccer and I never thought to check if you were okay.” His voice drops, and he swallows hard. “Is that why, Moritz? Is it because I didn’t check on you? Because I didn’t understand you well enough . . . ?”

Moritz has never seen Melchior like this, eyes wild with shame and shoulders pinched in guilt. Melchi is never shaken. He is rarely lost for words. Moritz has seen him under pressure, in grief, in disappointment, and he has never looked so agitated as he does right now, in the wake of almost losing Moritz. 

It’s a morbid sort of comfort, Moritz supposes, but it _does_ comfort him. 

“It wasn’t that,” Moritz says honestly. “It wasn’t you. It was – it was a lot of things. A predisposition to mental illness, for one. A total inability to deal with things, for another. My parents. Schoolwork. But it really wasn’t your fault. I promise.”

Melchior meets his eyes, and Moritz sees a little relief travel through them – but not enough to clear them of worry entirely. “I talked to Ilse,” says Melchior, shifting in his seat uncomfortably, and Moritz feels his heart snag. 

“When?” he asks, trying to keep his voice even, casual. “What happened?”

“After you . . . you know,” says Melchi. His gaze falls back to the table. “She said . . . that this wasn’t the first time.”

Moritz tries to read his face. Etched beneath the worry, he thinks, is a sizable twinge of hurt. “After I flunked out,” he says quietly. “Before I learned about summer classes. I thought they’d have to hold me back a year. My father was furious. He threatened to kick me out, and – it just seemed preferable.”

Melchior draws in a deep breath. “Why didn’t you tell me?” 

Moritz waits a long moment before answering. He thinks of how he’d been distracted by the bruises on her wrist, how she’d noticed him staring. How she’d covered by asking what he planned to do with that revolver, and he’d better not be about to shoot himself, because there weren’t enough Moritz Stiefels in the world as it was. 

            Moritz shrugs. “I didn’t want to freak you out. And you – you had Wendla, and you were busy, you know, getting laid and everything, and I just – didn’t want to interrupt.”

            Melchi looks so wounded that Moritz might as well have smacked him upside the head with _Young Goedeschal_.“You think my sex life is more important than _your life_?” he demands, and every head in the coffee shop turns to their table.

            Moritz fails to stifle a laugh, and when the mortification finally melts away, Melchi’s face softens a little, too. “For the record,” he says, a smile quirking at the corners of his mouth, “it isn’t.”

            “Well, thanks,” says Moritz, grinning back. Then, the words catching a little in his throat, “Um – where did you see Ilse?”

            “Here,” says Melchi, and this is as casual to him as it is significant to Moritz. And really, Moritz thinks, why shouldn’t it be? Melchior and Wendla stumbled upon each other, childhood friendship that bloomed into attraction; he barely had to pursue her. She’s always been within arm’s reach of him. He hasn’t been the one sitting here for hours sifting through voices trying to find the one that saved him.  

             “She must come here a lot,” Melchior muses. “Ernst knew her order by heart.” He glances at Moritz. “Why? Do you . . . are you attracted to her?”

            Sometimes Moritz can’t understand how Melchior, with his penchant for antiquated, parental expressions, got laid before he did.

*

            He slogs through finals at what seems like a glacial pace, but he manages to do it while feeling fairly competent about _nearly_ everything – statistics might have gone south toward the end – and without having a single anxiety attack. For this, he is proud of himself, and he thinks that maybe he’ll even be able to deal if he doesn’t do so well in statistics.

            He drops by Rhythm and Brews on his way home for a coffee and a piece of Thea’s dad’s lemon cake as a reward for surviving his exams. Although he hasn’t seen any evidence of Ilse’s presence in town since he was here with Melchi last weekend, he keeps his eyes open as he waits for Ernst to prepare his dark-roast-milk-three-sugars. He can’t stick around today anyway – he has a meeting with his psychiatrist to discuss the dosage of his meds in half an hour.

            “Hey, Ernst?” he asks when the other boy slides the cardboard cup and paper bag across the counter. “Does Ilse come in here often?”

            Ernst nods. “Every so often, yeah.”

            “What does she usually order?”

            “Dirty chai,” he says immediately. “Every single time. Why?”

            “I – um. Okay. Would you . . . if I paid for her drink now, like for the next time she came in, would you think that was weird? If you were Ilse?”

            Ernst studies him. “If someone bought my drink in advance? I mean, sort of, yeah, but it’s kind of sweet, too, isn’t it? Romantic.”

            “Is it?” he asks, dropping his gaze to open his wallet and assess his financial situation. “Do you think Ilse would like romantic? And how much is a dirty chai?”

            “Four-fifty,” says Ernst. “She always comes in alone, and she always looks lonely. So I’d say, sure, go for romantic.”

            Moritz briefly wonders if anyone has seen him at his back corner table and considered romancing him, but the thought is quickly overrun by the notion of what he’s about to do. This is something he can’t take back or duck out of, something that will get Ilse’s attention.

            Historically, Moritz is rather bad at being paid attention. He gets flustered and he stammers and occasionally he has anxiety attacks. He’s much more comfortable standing just outside the frame of the spotlight, where his own shortcomings and awkward bits are shielded by the darkness.

            But he digs five crumpled singles out of his wallet and hands them to Ernst. “Tell her it was me,” he says. “Um, do you know if she has a phone?”

            She didn’t, last spring. She said she couldn’t afford to pay the bills, the way she was living.

            “Probably not,” he decides before Ernst can answer. “Well – she knows where to find me, I think.”

            “You’re here every other day,” says Ernst dryly. “I’m sure you’ll run into each other eventually.”

            Moritz shakes his head. “Studies show: no.”

            “Well, I’ll give her the message,” says Ernst. “‘Mademoiselle, it seems your dirty chai has been paid for in advance by a certain dashing young Moritz Stiefel. He requests your company at his residence at your convenience.’”

            Moritz, torn between apprehension and exhilaration, almost laughs. He is doing this, and it’s going to work, and he is going to find her.

            “Thanks, Ernst,” he says, slipping his wallet into his back pocket and gathering his coffee and cake. “I owe you one, okay?”

            He’s almost out the door when he whirls around, sloshing his coffee through the slot of its plastic top. “Wait, Ernst?”

            “Yeah?”

            “Don’t say the last part if she looks like she thinks it’s weird,” he says, the words tumbling over each other. “The residence-convenience part. Just, like, I don’t know, try to make her forget that I exist or something.”

            Ernst gives him a weary look over the counter. “Go home, Moritz.”

            He nods, bumping the door open with a bony hip and lurching out into the cold. He tucks the cake bag into his jacket pocket and steps aside from the doorway, sticking his coffee cup into the lifeless dirt of one of the flowerboxes on the sill of the front window so he can light a cigarette.

            He has just brought the lighter to his face when he sees her beyond the flame. Her bright hair is chopped short now, its ends just poking out of a black knit cap, but she is unmistakable.

            “ _Ilse_!” he garbles around the cigarette, and the strange, rasping sound is enough to grab her attention.

            “Moritz?” she asks, squinting at him. It feels like she’s looking straight through him, as if noticing a ghost, until their eyes meet and he is suddenly aware of how real she is.

He shoves the lighter back into his pocket and extracts the cigarette from his lips. “Ilse!” he repeats, and that’s when he notices that his hands are shaking. “I – I just – I just bought you, um, fuck, I just – _fuck_.” He twists his hands together, crushing the cigarette. “I – for Chrissake, Ilse, say something.”

“You . . . bought me?” she asks, stepping closer to him as a man pushes through the door.

            Moritz squeezes his eyes shut. “No, I . . . God, this is going to sound really stupid.”

She cocks her head, expectant. There’s an undercurrent of worry in her eyes, and it takes a second for him to understand why:         the last time he saw her, he had a gun in his hands.

The memory jars him, and, with a flood of disappointment, he remembers.

“I have to go,” he says, snatching his coffee out of the flowerbox. “Go, um, go buy your dirty chai” – _fuck_ , he thinks, he’s not supposed to know that – “and please can I talk to you soon?”

“Moritz,” she says again, and he makes himself look her in the eye. She stands with her feet apart, a stance that conjures strength and control, the same way she used to stand over him on the playground. Her arms are folded over her chest now, instead of perched on her hips, but the command in her dark-lined eyes is the same. “Don’t go anywhere,” she says, and he wills himself not to wilt.

            “I have to,” he tells her. “I have – I – there’s an appointment I have to go to. But please – can I see you soon? Tomorrow. I’m always here, you can usually find me – or I’ll be at home, but don’t come there, I’ll meet you somewhere, or –”

            “Here,” she interrupts, and he falls silent. “Here is fine. Tomorrow. Leave your gun at home.”

            She sees him blink a little too quickly, sees him step back: he watches his movements register on her face. “Oh, God,” she says. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean – I’m so sorry.”

            He clears his throat, tensing his fingers around his coffee cup. “I will,” he says, trying to square his shoulders. “Leave it at home. I promise. You can even frisk me if you want to.”

            Her eyes widen a little, and a hot flush creeps up his neck as the corners of her mouth tug upward. This, he thinks, is precisely why Melchior got laid first – he might talk like an elderly professor, but at least he doesn’t say anything stupid.

            “Oh, Christ,” he mutters, ducking his head. “I’m gonna go now. But I’ll see you tomorrow. Here. Afternoon?”

            “Yeah,” she says, the hint of a smile still on her face. “Around this time would be good.”

            “Okay,” he says, making a final sort of gesture with the hand holding his coffee. Liquid sloshes out, dripping onto his shoes. “I’ll – I’ll see you then.”

            He turns toward home, and he hears her call after him, “Hey, what did you buy me?”

*

            He’s pretty sure his psychiatrist is going to double his anxiety meds, that’s how much seeing Ilse has thrown him. She has, if possible, become more intimidating in her absence – she always seems so much more _adult_ than Moritz feels. And then, unnervingly, she can turn back into the girl he grew up with in just a flash of her pale eyes or the dance of a smile.

            He arrives at Rhythm and Brews a half hour before he agreed to meet with Ilse in hopes of consulting Martha about how girls operate, and he’s in luck – she’s refilling the milk pitchers and the baskets of sugar packets. He collapses at the table nearest to her, laying his head on his folded arms.

            “What’s up?” she asks, replacing the soy canister.

            “I don’t know how to talk to girls,” he mutters into his forearm.

            “You’re talking to me,” she says. “And you’re doing fine.”

            He struggles around saying _But I don’t want to date you_. “Yeah, but you’re dating Otto. And, like, you’re not like Ilse. She’s all – unpredictable, and, I don’t know, she’s here and then she’s not – and you’re always here. I talk to you all the time. I haven’t really talked to Ilse, like _really_ talked to her since” – _since last spring_ – “since high school.”

            Martha nods. “Okay. That’s fair. What happened with Ilse? You asked me about her the other day.”

            Moritz mumbles into his arms.

            She flicks him gently on the temple, and he raises his head just enough to narrow his eyes at her. “What happened?” she repeats.

            He shrugs, pulling himself upright. “I kind of . . . like her. You know.”

            “Okay,” she says, refilling the basket of Sweet ’n’ Low. “What do you need help with?”

            “Well, I saw her yesterday. Just for a little bit, and she’s meeting me here in like twenty minutes, and all I did yesterday was stutter and make a total ass out of myself, and I guess I just don’t know how to, like, pull it together and have an actual conversation with her.”

            Martha glances at him, a small smile on her lips. “I don’t know if you know this,” she says, “but I used to have a little crush on you.”

            He whips toward her. “You _did_? When? Why?”

            She shrugs. “Oh, it must have been a few years ago. I think we were fourteen, fifteen. You were so mysterious, and you have those deep dark eyes that always looked sort of lost and melancholic.”

            “I don’t look lost and melancholic,” he protests, but even as he says it, he realizes: he probably kind of does.

            “It works for you,” Martha assures him. “And then you smile and it’s like everything is okay again.”

            “Is that why you liked me?” he asks, twisting his mouth experimentally. Nope – everything still feels as shitty and confusing as it did ten seconds ago.

            She shakes her head, filling the Splenda basket. “You seemed like you’d understand things that were hard to talk about. You didn’t seem judgmental. To me, those were the most important things about you. They still are.”

            He thinks of the night she told him about her father. They sat on her foster parents’ back porch, the twilight punctuated by the other kids’ shrieks and laughter. He held her hand, and she stared straight ahead the entire time, her voice steady and even. They’d both been flagged as potentially troubled kids by their guidance counselor in high school, though he’d never known the extent of Martha’s situation. He expected a familiar story – he’s been hit more than once, for low grades and laziness and for being a general disappointment – but it had been so much worse, and he told her how brave she was for enduring it without breaking.

            “And both of those things,” Martha continues, and he shakes himself back to the present, “are important to Ilse, and I think she knows by now that you’re nonjudgmental and a good listener. And you’re a total sweetheart, Moritz. As long as you don’t panic, you’ll be fine. And even if you do panic, Ilse’s known you forever. She knows that’s how you are.”

            “I have meds for that,” he says, slightly nettled. “It’s controllable.”

            “Well, just in case,” says Martha, and as he opens his mouth to respond, Ilse breezes into the shop. Martha grins, and Moritz bites his lip so hard he tastes blood.

            “Go get ’em,” she teases, tousling his hair. “And let me know how it goes.”

            He heaves himself upright and catches Ilse’s eye. “I will. Thanks.”

            And then Ilse is in front of him, and she smells like honey and woods, and her military-style coat is unzipped just enough to reveal the neckline of a deep violet dress. Moritz’s throat goes dry.

            And then she pulls off her knit cap and swats him with it.

            “You ass!” she says, but she’s laughing. “You bought me a drink and then ran away? What kind of move is that?”

            “I had an appointment!” he protests. “But, um – come on. I’ll buy you another one, if you want.”

            “I want,” she agrees. “Dirty chais don’t come cheap, you know.”

            “Yeah, I know,” he says. “I bought my first one yesterday.”

            She shoves him playfully, and Ernst gives the two of them a knowing glance as they approach the counter. “Together or separate?”

            “Together,” says Moritz, peeling a handful of bills out of his wallet, and Ernst labels two cardboard cups. Moritz wonders if he has everyone’s order memorized, or just the two of theirs.

            “You said you wanted to talk,” Ilse reminds him as they wait for their drinks, and the banter they built up two minutes ago crashes down on Moritz’s chest.

            “Yeah,” he says, avoiding her eyes. “There’s some stuff.”

            “Do you want to stay here?”

            He shrugs. “I don’t care. You choose.”

            “Let’s walk,” she says.

            She’s uncharacteristically quiet as they collect their drinks and leave the shop. He trails behind her as she detours off the street and toward the woods, and only then does he realize where she’s heading.

            He thinks he should have expected the brook. Their history is carved in its grassy banks; it whispers around rocks and cattails. He has lost count of the number of times they launched their pirate ship from its mudflats, or waded up to their knees during the swelter of summer. He remembers, particularly vividly, Ilse splashing around in her underwear and bra when they were thirteen or fourteen. “It’s just like a bathing suit,” she’d argued.

            He used to come here during high school to escape – Melchior preferred the comfort of his desk, and when he did venture into the woods, he favored the shade of his oak tree to the soft murmur of the water. But the flow of the brook comforted Moritz; he drank it in, a sort of company achieved without the burden of a person to entertain. If he had to choose a place to be his _final_ place, the last place he saw before joining the angels – of course it would be the brook.

            It’s not quite a comfort today. Familiar, yes, but there’s too much baggage attached to it now, a weight just the size and heft of a handgun.

            “Do you still like to come here?” Ilse asks, as if reading his mind. She flops down on the bank and reaches out to toe a chunk of ice at the edge. The brook isn’t entirely frozen, but small floes drift lazily across the water’s surface.

            Moritz sits next to her, careful not to spill his coffee. “I haven’t come at all recently. I’ve been – it’s been a busy semester.”

            She nods without looking at him, circling her hands around her cup. The memory of the bruises nags at him, but her wrists are safe inside her sleeves. And then he remembers – Melchior told her. She knows what happened.

            “It must have been busy for you, too,” he says, and he barely knows which words he’s forming before they tumble out. “I didn’t hear from you at all.”

            She takes a long, quiet swallow of tea.

            “I would have liked to hear from you,” he says.

            “I missed you,” he says.

            “I overdosed,” he says, and her eyes are on him so quickly that he jumps a little, splattering coffee onto his jeans.

            “Goddamn,” he mutters, as she says, “That’s what I was waiting for.”

            “For me to spill my coffee?” He scrubs at the spots with his jacket sleeve.

            “For fuck’s sake, Moritz. No. For you to tell me what was going on.”

            “You could have spoken to me,” Moritz suggests. “Any time between last summer and now would have been fine.”

            “Communication goes two ways!” she retorts, her eyes flashing. “You know where to find me, Moritz. I’m always here. I’m _always here_.”

            The words drag her voice down, ragged. She has said them before, but they’re not a reassurance this time. To Moritz, they sound more like a condemnation.

            “You’re not anywhere,” he argues. How else to explain an entire semester in this goddamn town and no sign of her anywhere? “You’re only here when you want to be.”

            “What does that _mean_?” she demands, setting her drink down and turning to face him. “It’s always like that with you. You’ve got no idea what you want. You think you do, but it’s always ‘What are you looking for, Moritz?’ ‘If only I knew.’ ‘Do you want to come back to my place, Moritz?’ ‘I don’t know.’ You have _no idea_.”

            “I’ve got some idea,” he says, and he puts his hand on top of one of hers.

            He doesn’t try to kiss her. He tried that on Martha once, when they were sixteen and tipsy, and she drew back so quickly she nearly fell over. Instead, he cautiously lifts her hand and gently runs his thumb across her wrist.

            She watches him for a few hot, pressurized moments, and then she says, “If you try to kiss me without explaining your plan to kill yourself, round two, so help me, Moritz Stiefel, I will pour this dirty chai on you.”

            So he tells her.

            When he’s done, her fingers are tightly knotted through his.

            “What did I do wrong last time?” she asks.

            Her hands are slim and strong and cold, and he focuses on them as he replies, “What do you mean?”

            He feels her stare at him until he looks up at her. “When you were going to do it the first time. I tried to tell you not to, didn’t I? Was that not enough?”

            _You don’t have to do that_ ,  she’d said. Please _don’t do that_.

            For the time being, it had been enough. But that was before a summer of taking remedial classes while the rest of his friends prepared to study important things in cool places, before a semester of falling more behind than ever before.

             “I don’t think it’s something that could really be helped like that,” he says slowly. “I mean – it wasn’t your fault, it _obviously_ wasn’t your fault – but no matter what you said, it wouldn’t have changed that I was depressed, you know? It wouldn’t have gotten rid of that. And then I started classes and everything was so much shittier than it had been, and . . . I don’t know. I couldn’t do it. That’s how it felt.” He takes a deep breath, pushes it out. “But it’s better now. I have meds. I feel better than I have in a long time.” He gives her hand a squeeze.

            “I’m glad you’re here,” she says quietly, and she lays her head on his shoulder.

            “I’m glad I’m here too,” he says. “I never got to tell you thank you last spring.”

            This is where he kisses her. It’s jerky, and a little awkward, because he has to lean down to where she’s lying against his shoulder, but she doesn’t jump back, and her chai stays firmly on the ground.

            “You’re at the community college, right?” she asks when they break apart, her lipstick a little smudged, Moritz a little breathless. He thinks it’s a strange question to pose after their first kiss, but he nods.

            “Yeah. For the foreseeable future. Why?”

            She shrugs. “I think I’m going to enroll next semester. I’ve got to go back to school sometime. But I’d like to be sure that I’ll have some company before I make that decision.”

            The grin splits his face. “Yeah,” he says. “I’ll be there.”

_the end_

            


End file.
